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My Story, Part 2: A Period of Naive Vibrancy

6 years ago5,577 words

Continuing on from ∞ the previous post in this series ∞, I talk about how I got started making digital art and composing music.

I went to school in Australia, and - after about a year - I made a small number of (also all male) friends. We were the unpopular, weird guys, who were into games and computers; I imagine most schools have at least one group like this. I took their company for granted, and didn't really see them very often outside school; I preferred to do stuff alone at a computer in the free time that I had instead. I had my own computer for the first time, and consoles of my own too, so much of my time was spent with games in some form or another.

Shortly after arriving in Australia, I got a pirated version of something called Final Fantasy Chronicles at a car boot sale (I think?), which comprised PlayStation ports of the SNES games Final Fantasy IV and Chrono Trigger. I'd never played any of the Final Fantasies preceding VII before this, so these were my first 'old school' JRPGs. I was really charmed by the 2D tile-based pixel graphics and the battles against static enemies, even moreso than the 3D games I was used to. I suppose I liked the abstractness of these graphics, and having experience with the Digimon sprites I'd been playing around with in Paint, they felt more like the kind of graphics I'd eventually be able to make myself. Perhaps. I can't remember what went through my mind back then!



Notably, Chrono Trigger included a trio of important characters named after the Three Wise Men (though I didn't know that at the time): Balthazar, Gaspar, and Melchior. That was my first exposure to those names.

Not long after, I discovered emulators, and was able to play a whole bunch of MegaDrive, SNES, NES etc games from my what-seemed-like-ages-ago childhood, and others that I'd missed out on, including the other Final Fantasies that predated VII.

I also got Baldur's Gate, which was my first proper PC game since Commander Keen. It was an RPG based on Dungeons & Dragons, and was my first exposure to that and the general style of Western RPGs. I played through the main campaign as a boring male Fighter called Lone Wolf, who had long brown hair and a beard (I chose Fighter rather than something more in line with my personality - like a mage - because I didn't know what I was doing, and the game probably suggested that class as a good option for beginners). Eventually he acquired some armour called Ankheg Plate Mail, which was emerald green. I liked the look of it, and stuck with it for that reason even when better options became available.



I remember developing enough of an understanding of 'computer stuff' to import my own custom character portraits and voice sets. I'd got a Playstation 2 and was very much into Final Fantasy X at this time (I particularly liked Auron as a character!), and as such I made a party of Baldur's Gate characters based on the FFX cast, with voice clips and portraits harvested from the official website.

I had creative urges, but no real medium through which to express them. I'd draw on paper sometimes, but less and less often as I spent more and more of my time staring at a monitor. The clunky old family computer I was glued to had Microsoft Office programs, and I'd play around making things in those for lack of other options. I'd write silly stories in Word, but I'd also use PowerPoint to make these strange 'adventures', where I'd use animations (like an image sliding in from the left, or appearing after a delay) to choreograph 'dialogue' and 'battles' between characters represented by clipart. Knights and soldiers fighting pointlessly, usually.

One of those PowerPoint things that I made was about a clipart knight randomly called Mardek (the name wasn't inspired by a Mesopotamian deity), who went to a place called the Sun Temple and met a golden wolf childishly called Solaar (who could use light magic!), with whom he fought against lizardmen and an evil sorcerer. None of the characters had anything beyond the vaguest hints of a personality. I wish I still had it - I'm sure it'd be amusingly embarrassing - but sadly it's been lost forever.

Occasionally I'd get into a game with a map editor and spend a lot of time on it, including some strange ones like Tenchu 2, one of the Tony Hawk games, and Max Payne, all of which I stuck with despite not actually liking their main content just because they allowed me to use their assets to make my own levels in some way. I always tried to make RPG-style adventures, with little success considering the settings and mechanics of those games! Chances are I'd have spent forever in Minecraft had it been around when I was young (as it is, I've never actually played it).

Eventually I got Neverwinter Nights, a D&D-based Western RPG and the successor to the Baldur's Gate games, which included an extensive map editor that allowed you to make your own 'modules': full stories with whatever characters, areas, dialogue, etc you wanted. This was like the holy grail to me as it allowed me to make the kinds of things I'd been struggling to make using inappropriate tools that could never actually produce them, so I made a lot of those modules. However - you'll be surprised by this - I didn't finish most of the ones that I started. I wish I still had the game - and the modules I'd made - so then I could include a screenshot, but here's one harvested from Google for illustrative purposes, which floods my mind with warm nostalgia:



I played through the main campaign as a character I called Lone Wolf, who was a basic Fighter with long brown hair and a beard, and who eventually acquired a suit of green plate armour that he wore all the time. I wonder where that idea came from.

One of the modules that I made was called Governance de Magi. It focused on a character whose adoptive father - a wizard in white robes called Rohoph - told them that they were now old enough to become an adventurer, and they could start by travelling from their hometown of Goznor to the nearby village of Canonia to stop some monsters there, which were flaring up after the disappearance of the region's shaman. As the player exited the house they lived in with Rohoph, they were met by Emela Jard, their childhood friend, who wanted to join them on their adventure. To get to Canonia, they had to travel past a region called Lake Qur, and had to venture under the water to defeat a Lake Hag (which was an actual ∞ D&D hag ∞) at the desperate urging of a nymph called Elwyen. They found Canonia overrun by undead, and were optionally able to hire one of two possible allies: a ranger called Zach, or a paladin called Vehrn. They travelled into a poisoned cave to stop what turned out to be the undead shaman in the depths, though she spoke of her master giving her power as she double-died. They returned to Goznor to find it also now overrun with undead, and Rohoph explained that his old adventuring companion, a necromancer called Moric, was responsible. He and Moric used to be part of a group called the Governance de Magi, and Rohoph was sad to see his old friend doing something so evil. You ventured into Goznor's catacombs to stop Moric; you found that he had become a lich, but managed to defeat him. The story ended with Rohoph speaking of the other wizards who were part of the Governance de Magi, and a brief scene was shown where one called Qualna was looking into a crystal ball.

Neverwinter Nights modules were typically meant to be played by a character of the player's making rather than the module maker's, much as pen-and-paper D&D campaigns would let the players make their own characters rather than the Dungeon Master making them himself. As such, that story had no predefined protagonist called Mardek. Deugan didn't exist either.

After spending many months making modules using the 'vanilla' assets, I felt the urge to make my modules more my own by making custom assets, essentially modding the game. I tried 3D modelling for the first time so then I could make my own creatures, most likely after looking online to see how to do this rather than waiting to be shown how by anyone. I didn't stick with it for very long or create anything remotely impressive, though. The only evidence that I have left of the many hours I spent dabbling in that particular skill is this tiny, blurry screenshot of some creatures based on floating lingon heads, heavy with particle effects:



Wow, wait, no, I just found this:



Triobots (TRY-oh-bots, not TREE-oh-bots) were one of the Draco System races, which were mechanical lifeforms that lived in a hive like ants, or something. I was proud of this 3D one at the time, but I'd forgotten all about it until just now! It was animated and everything, and I'd successfully added it to Neverwinter Nights to use as a creature in modules.



I also tried my hand at composing music, so then I could add a custom soundtrack to my modules. I knew essentially nothing about music though, and my only experience with it was a few basic recorder lessons in primary school; I couldn't play any instruments, couldn't really read sheet music, and certainly didn't know any music theory. I didn't even listen to bands like most teenagers did, and had little to no awareness of the 'music scene' (I still probably wouldn't know most bands that people would mention). I was however really enchanted by game soundtracks. In the first post in this series, I talked about how I'd record myself 'singing' the instrumental music from Final Fantasy games into my PC's microphone when I wanted to keep it for future listening, but had no better way to do so. These days you'd just search on YouTube and get whatever music you wanted instantly. Things were tougher in the olden days! Get off my lawn!

Anyway, here's one of a handful of pieces of unpleasant "music" that I made during this period of ignorance, if your ears can bear it:

Dardek

Dardek. Hmm. Interesting name, that.

That 'music' is the second thing I ever composed (the first is a barely coherent tangle of sound), and I remember being proud of it at the time. That's entirely because I made it though; it definitely isn't pleasant to listen to now. It's interesting that it has at least a semblance of structure, though, despite the odd harshness of the overall sound; it's not completely incoherent, I don't think.

Dardek was a lizardman with absolutely no personality (a recurring theme with these early characters) who joined the player in a module called Fig Hunter, where, after being rigorously trained how to be a true Fig Hunter by a hilariously insane dwarf called Fignar Hakentaightainford, you had to journey to the top of Mount Fig to do battle against a fig there or something, I don't know. That's a literal fig, as in the fruit. And you'd do battle with it. It's amusing, you see, because an inanimate fruit isn't much of a threat, but it was treated as if it was the greatest of threats. I hope you appreciate the joke. I ended up naming a website after it, and loads of people made that a significant part of their life for a while likely without awareness of the ridiculous origins of the name. So that's weird. I'll get to that later.

Like so much of what I came up with during my formative years, even this was derivative. I'd recently discovered Monty Python, and ∞ this sketch ∞ - where two hunters use a ridiculous amount of firepower to defeat a harmless mosquito, the wings of which are worth "up to 0.8 of a penny" - apparently stuck with me for whatever reason. Hunting figs was just an extension of that. It's strange, since it's not like that was my favourite sketch that I watched again and again or anything; I must have only seen it once, and likely didn't think much of it at the time. It's just random chance, really, that meant that a half-hearted mostly-borrowed joke grew into something much larger.

Also, I suppose Dardek went on to influence the lizardmen in Deliverance and MARDEK and such. The name thing (similarity to Mardek) is a coincidence though.

Here's another of the handful of compositions from this ignorant period:

Lupin

This was the theme of Lupin, who was a villain and also a werewolf. He led a group of bandits called the Wolf Bandits. How did I even come up with something so awe-inspiringly original?? God, I wish I hadn't lost that wondrous imagination I had back in my brighter-eyed days.

I was using a program called DirectMusic Producer for making midis, which used a track layout, rather than a sheet music one, meaning that there was no clear distinction between in-key notes and accidentals. Since I didn't know anything about key signatures or chords or anything, this meant that what I ended up with was atonal; the melodies - such that they were - were chromatic, and the harmony was essentially nonexistent.

It's interesting that while both of these are clearly the ugly work of a clueless amateur, I tried to make the music go places, have it explore and cover varied ground - especially in the second one - so I seemed to at least have an innate sense of that. But I suppose these have a musical narrative in the same way that dreams have a plot; things happen, but it doesn't really make sense as to why.



It's around this period where I first started browsing the internet more freely. I think it was still a new thing, the internet; niche, a hobby for nerds, supposedly bereft of girls, not integrated deeply into everyone's lives as it is now. YouTube didn't even exist! Nor did social media.

There were however community sites, one of which was deviantART (I think it was only a couple of years old at that point). I joined that, and for the first time in my life I met other artists who drew the sort of things I wanted to draw. Digital artists, even! Seeing these people and their creative output motivated me to produce a lot of my own art, though it - like everything I did at this time - was a work of naive intuition, unrefined and undisciplined. I'd dive into digital drawings with the vaguest of ideas and only an inkling of anatomy, colour theory, form, composition... Basically, I didn't really know what I was doing, but I was eager and enjoyed it nonetheless. My digital drawings were darkly vibrant, and mostly of dragons and wolves (how original), or the Draco System species I mentioned earlier.

Here's a particularly garish example of one of the earliest things I've been able to dredge up from my older folders:



Good god, that's ugly. Urgh. Look at that hideous Photoshop filter in the background! And that dodge/burn 'shading' with no regard for light sources! I don't even remember making this, and it has no personal significance; I'm just including it because it's particularly bad!

I almost never drew people because I lacked the confidence, and I suppose I felt so distant from them that it usually didn't occur to me to do so. Here's a rare attempt from that same period (2004), which looks stiff (though it's actually less bad than I'd expect):



I thought that design looked appealing at the time. He was also called Fenris, because he was a lone wolf. He was very sarcastic. Sigh... How we grow.

It's interesting that I also copied this next one by eye from official art of the character in 2004 (using a mouse!), as one of my very first digital drawings, and then didn't use any references for years afterwards... I would have improved more quickly if I had.



As I mentioned earlier, Auron was my favourite Final Fantasy X character - perhaps my favourite Final Fantasy character in general, other than maybe Red XIII - and I half-heartedly dressed up as him once. Perhaps I'd have got into cosplaying and that whole world of conventions and fandoms if I'd known like-minded people, but I didn't even know it was a thing until years later when my own interest had long faded.

Though I didn't keep a sketchbook, use tutorials, or do any research about how to improve my art skills, I did seem to get a bit better just by diving blindly into 'finished pieces'. This, from a couple of months after those, does look at least a bit better (I've no idea what the inspiration was though; I think I just tended to go with whatever whims floated to the top of my mind rather than trying to make a meaningful statement or communicate an idea that was important to me):



Death is just the beginning. What does that even mean? How deep, though. How deep. Also that zombie dragon looks really smug. "Heeey baaaabyyy, likin' the view, huh?"



I came up with a silly fake 'religion' called Yalortism around this time. I went to Christian schools my whole life, not because my family were religious, but just because these particular schools happened to be nearby and well-regarded. Odd that that was the case both in the UK and on the other side of the planet in Australia. Hmm. I'd been an increasingly obnoxious atheist since as long as I can remember, though, and as I wasn't exactly a loudly assertive person, this anti-religious sentiment came out in the form of concepts explored in relative privacy like this (as well as reading a lot by Richard Dawkins etc).

Yalortism started as a joke between friends, but I stuck with it as an idea because I wanted something to build a community website around, as I wanted to learn how to do that... I can't remember why I had that desire, though. Maybe just the innate drive to create? I'd been playing around with web design, teaching myself HTML and bits of JavaScript from online tutorials, but I'd only made a little personal website. I suppose I must have lacked social fulfillment and wanted to bring people together - or to me, to be more honestly selfish about it - in order to fill the hole in my soul. I roped the friends I had into it, but it was irritating; we decided to have hierarchical roles within Yalortism, but one of the guys I knew wanted to have a higher rank than me despite the fact that I'd done all the work. I wasn't dominant enough to insist on anything though, so I just let him have that. They also rarely if ever actually posted on the community site I'd built, though I do seem to remember some other people getting there from somewhere... My memory of this period is fuzzy.

I do have a screenshot of it though:



The site's footer says that I made it on 23/7/2004, and that one's from mid 2005; it's the earliest archived snapshot available. Nobody but me and my schoolchums were aware of it at that point, it seems. I notice there's a link to David Firth's site there, Fat-Pie, presumably because his animations (Salad Fingers, etc) were popular on Newgrounds at the time. Maybe you remember that if you're around my age.

I continued to develop the site for a couple of years, and here's a later screenshot (which I'm mostly including because I made this one before that previous one and don't want to remove it, though it does show improvements in my design skills):



(Ha, looks better in IE than Firefox... Makes me laugh, that. I think Chrome was but a twinkle in some developer's eye at this point, though.)

These images evoke mixed feelings. A mix of embarrassment and pride. I'm still proud to a degree that I made that site myself using self-taught skills, but... as a sheltered male teenager lacking in social skills and emotional intelligence, my online voice wasn't exactly one that I'd be proud to associate with myself these days. I wasn't deliberately aggressive directly towards others out of the belief that it was a good thing to be, as some people seem to be, but I probably wasn't as tactful or considerate as I liked to think I was. It's painful to admit that, especially since I often wonder whether these days that's still the case... There are many qualities regarded as undesirable by others that I freely admit I have - I'm neurotic, reserved, not manly, etc - because they don't clash with the self image that I'd prefer to have. But I'd prefer to be a nice, empathetic person, so the realisation that my ideal self and my actual self are at odds is an unpleasant one.

It's also interesting that this second screenshot seems to be from a period where I was already having to deal with trolls. I wasn't well-known online by any means back then, so few people knew about the site or had any reason to join, but a couple of guys from my school decided to troll it in various ways. In person, they seemed fine, amicable, not malicious; they weren't mean to me, we didn't even interact. But then they'd go on to cause frustration online for fun. I suppose there are many reasons why... Perhaps I had a reputation - unbeknownst to me - as a weirdo, and it was funny to torment me? Or - perhaps more likely - they were just oblivious, as we are when we're young, and didn't realise the extent of the emotional harm they were doing. Just like how I liked to think of myself as a good person when I'd surely caused more pain than I realised to people to whom I'd been too self-absorbed, not considerate enough.

Anyway, I'll be returning to all that deeper into this series of posts... I bet you can't wait.

I've mentioned Yalortism because it's how I got my start making joinable websites, and because I have a bunch of arts of YALORT, whose name should be in all caps but isn't in those screenshots, apparently. YALORT was a composite of three things: a dragon, a green tiger, and an Australian magpie. The green tiger thing was because the school I went to had four houses (like in Harry Potter!!), and the green one was called 'Taylor' (they were named after famous Australian athletes, because Australia is obsessed with sport; I'd never heard of any of them). Each house had an animal mascot (again, as in Harry Potter), and Taylor's was a tiger. You know, one of the animals Australia is most known for. "I don't want to go to Australia, it's full of tigers!", everyone says all the time. The house's name - T A Y L O R - hung in big green letters on a wall in one of the corridors, and one day, these had been shuffled by some impish vandal to spell Y A L O R T. We used that as the deity's name simply because we happened to be walking past it while talking about the idea. Australian magpies are huge and fierce and everywhere in Australia, and I think we walked past one of those after the wall letters, so it was incorporated into the design. Dragons were, of course, just an obsession of mine back then, so I couldn't not make YALORT partly one of those!

I drew YALORT a few times. These images span quite a long period (mid 2004 to late 2006), but I'm clumping them together here because of the shared subject matter, and because I consider them to be from the same 'period' of my creative life.











Seems like the tiger and magpie influences dwindled over time.

As those span a couple of years, some skill development can be seen, though not loads. I notice a lot of scribbliness in the lines; I was just getting used to using a Wacom tablet (a big clunky Intuos), I think - or maybe some were done with a mouse? - and had little confidence or control in my strokes. I also sometimes used scanned pencil sketches as the lineart during this period; I haven't done that in years. The second-to-last one was drawn in Flash, which I didn't typically do, which is why it looks crisper.

The skill development is more evident from these two images, I think. This is a lingon, from June 2004:



And here's another lingon, from September 2005, just over a year later:



That's a huge jump! I'm still quite fond of that 2005 one even now, though I don't know why it turned out so much better than the other because I don't remember doing any purposeful practise or anything.

There's a whole lot more art from this 'naively vibrant period', but there's a lot of overlap with the output of the other skills I was starting to develop simultaneously. I was 15/16, and it felt like creative doors had been opened, and a lot of passion and enthusiasm that had been unconsciously pent-up or restricted until then burst forth and was finally taking form. As such, it feels like 'everything started' when I was 16. I envy people who make meaningful progress in their creative skills at younger ages than that... though I suppose I'd been doodling for years before so it's not like I was starting with a completely blank slate.



I got a piano (well, a keyboard) when I was about 16, and had a handful of lessons; the only ones I've ever had. In those, I learned how to read sheet music, and was introduced to the basics of music theory. As I said earlier, I never really listened to music by bands, like most teenagers tended to, but I got very much into classical music and video game soundtracks. I'd listen to midis while watching the sheet music on sites like ∞ this one ∞ (which has changed surprisingly little since all those years ago), getting a feeling for how the music was constructed, how the written notes corresponded to the sound.

Like with art (and websites and games...), I didn't lay down a steady foundation of fundamentals before attempting difficult things; I dove straight into attempting to play classical pieces far beyond my skill level, fumbling my way through them clumsily and never really learning how to play anything very well. Even now, over a decade later, I can't exactly play the piano, at least not fluently, fluidly, or with any accuracy... I wish I'd just gone down the normal path of having forced practice sessions and exams to practise for. Oh well.

I composed a lot of private pieces of music just for my own pleasure; there are more than 200 (!) from the 2005-2006 period - most several minutes long - and it's really difficult choosing which ones to include here because so many of them are significant to me, or they're so different from one another that it's not as if they can just all be laid out in some clear progression. I would have preferred this post to be in chronological order, but the earliest ones are soundtracks for games I was making, and I'll talk a bit about those while talking about the games they were for. I will however include this, my very first composition post-piano-lessons:

Hymn of Yalort

Those pounding, repetitive chords aren't exactly pleasant, and the chord progression doesn't make sense. Still, there is actually a chord progression of sorts, so I understood the basic idea of those - and of chords and harmony in general - if not how to actually string together chords in a meaningful way.

That was from August 2004, but I didn't compose anything else, it seems, until early 2005, where I composed several pieces for the soundtrack of a game called Fig Hunter, which I'll get to shortly. After that, there's this piece, which was one of my favourites for a while, though it seems primitive to me now (but I still quite like it):

Blacksteed

I felt that it had a sort of Wild West feel to it, though I'm not sure why because it doesn't really.

I started the 'Ramble' series directly after that, on the same day in late April 2005, and finished these four over that day and the next:

Ramble 0
Ramble 1
Ramble 2
Ramble 3

I don't know why I started with 0; probably due to my then-newfound programming abilities and the fact that array indices start at 0. They're not very long, and I've included them all to show that I was interested in variety. Some composers compose a lot of samey pieces, it seems, all in one general genre or style... and there's nothing wrong with that. I was more interested in exploring different possibilities, in making every piece different. It annoyed me when I redid things I'd done before. It still does!

Those pieces are... not great, really, objectively, but I think they're definitely a step up from the other things from when I had absolutely no idea of what I was doing. There's at least some semblance of harmony in these, and I think the general structure reflects the fact that I'd been playing a lot of beginner piano pieces.

I quite enjoy Ramble 0, which sounds so naively hopeful to me; I even quoted it in ∞ Ramble 26 ∞, composed 13 years later. I enjoy listening to it occasionally even now, just because of its personal importance to me. It's such a shame that that's not something that can ever be shared... That nobody else can ever hear these old compositions like I can. It's the same for anything we're sentimentally attached to. Something might mean the world to us, but absolutely nothing to anyone else; they might even turn their nose up at it, judge it harshly, think you an idiot for liking it at all. So when I present my old music like this, I'm aware that I do like it myself but that it's not 'good', that others might listen to it and think "how could he possibly like something so terrible?", and, well, I probably overthink it, anyway! It's because they're important to me that I overthink it, though; it's difficult showing off things that are close to your heart which you know might not be met well by others.

(I like 3 as well, but feel neutral about 1 and 2. And it bothers me how a lot of these old pieces just suddenly stop, with no real ending! I'm not cutting them off, nor did I consider them unfinished; they just suddenly end. Maybe it's because I intended them to loop, like game music does?)

There were some standalone pieces where I was just playing around with ideas with no reason or purpose, much like my visual art. A couple of examples:

Honour & Stealth
Drunken Angel

These use the default midi soundset, which was also used in MARDEK, because I knew no better. I was learning all this stuff on my own, after all, with no guidance on how to go about it.

There are many, many more of these that I could include - and I haven't even got past 2005 yet! - but a lot of them are also from game soundtracks, as I said, and since I feel people are more interested in the games anyway, I want to talk a bit about those.



I'll end this here for now, because I start talking about my first attempts to make games in the next bit. I'll post that part soon. Thanks for reading!

(Also, a note: These posts usually have issues immediately after posting, which I take a few minutes to correct... I really need to add a way of editing them after they're submitted but before they're made public!)